Back to the Future

In honor of Namecheap’s 17th birthday on October 10th, let’s fire up our time machine. We’ll take a look at what some of our favorite companies were doing 17 years ago when Namecheap was born.

Dialing Back Our Time Machine

The Internet looked a lot different when Namecheap got started back in 2000. Most people weren’t regular web surfers yet, Twitter and Facebook wouldn’t come along for several years, and very few companies sold physical goods online.

In the year 2000, companies were just waking up to the possibilities the Internet offered. Using the Wayback Machine (a fantastic project of theInternet Archive) let’s take a look at what the Internet used to look like.

Google

Back then, Google was still a new kid on the block. The company began in 1998 when Standford doctoral students Larry Page and Sergey Brin took research they had done into data algorithms and launched their search engine. By 2000 it was already a popular option for finding things on the Internet, but it hadn’t completely refined its clean interface, and it still used a serif font with a drop shadow.

Amazon

Amazon started out as an online book retailer called “Cadabra” in 1994, but the name changed soon thereafter. Jeff Bezos launched the website Amazon.com a year later. The company adopted their iconic smiling arrow logo in 2000, and by this time Amazon had branched out to a number of other online merchandise categories in addition to books. Their website is much more streamlined today, but here you can see the seed of what they would become.

Apple.com

Apple Computer has always featured a simple, streamlined design for their website, and in some ways, their site hasn’t changed dramatically in 17 years. Their products, however, have. Take a look back at Apple’s brand new Power Mac G4 and wax nostalgic at the computer we all wanted to own back in the day.

StarWars.com

The original Star Wars movie entertained us back in 1977, and fans have loved all of the movies ever since. For a science fiction film, the official website was also quite a futuristic treat. The graphics were quite well-integrated for such an early website, and they even had an online poll, something relatively new for its time. Visually, it’s quite a treat compared to many of the other major websites that existed in the year 2000.

BBC

Like many early websites, the British Broadcasting Service designed their site for a default small monitor but did everything they could to maximize their limited browser real estate. This led to a cluttered and confusing design but did allow them to put a lot of information all in one place.

Namecheap

Finally, where was Namecheap in all this? Even at the beginning, we knew our customers wanted great deals and a fast, easy way to find the domains they were looking for. And we delivered. Our logo has changed dramatically over the years, but we’re still as committed to offering excellent value and top-tier customer service as we were when we started.

And look how far we’ve come in 17 years! This is what the Namecheap.com site looks like in 2017, always featuring our bold artwork (this one highlights KingCom!).

We hope you’ve enjoyed this little journey back in time. Thanks for being part of our family for these past 17 years. We look forward to serving you for many years to come.

Source: all screenshots (other than the current Namecheap website) are thanks to the work of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Dates are courtesy of Wikipedia.

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